At a speech in Manassas, VA, November 3, 2008

“Virginia, let’s go change the world!”

Walt Whitman, “Election Day, 1884″

If I should need to name, O Western World, your powerfulest scene and show,
‘Twould not be you, Niagara–nor you, ye limitless prairies–nor
your huge rifts of canyons, Colorado,
Nor you, Yosemite–nor Yellowstone, with all its spasmic
geyser-loops ascending to the skies, appearing and disappearing,
Nor Oregon’s white cones–nor Huron’s belt of mighty lakes–nor
Mississippi’s stream:
–This seething hemisphere’s humanity, as now, I’d name–the still
small voice vibrating–America’s choosing day,

“I also have an adult wood turtle about six inches long.  Her top shell is the equal of any seashell for sculpture…it’s like an old, dusty, richly engraved medallion dug out of a hillside.  Her legs are salmon-orange…She has a turtleneck neck, a tail like an elephant’s, wise old pachydermous hind legs, and the face of a turkey–except that when I carry her she gazes at the passing ground with a hawk’s eyes and mouth.  Her feet fit to the fingers of my hand, one to each one, and she rides looking down….if an earthworm is presented, she jerks swiftly ahead, poises above it, and strikes like a mongoose, consuming it with wild vigor.  Yet she will climb on my lap to eat bread or boiled eggs.”

–from Edward Hoagland’s “The Courage of Turtles”

“Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.”

–Ernest Hemingway

The show, Criminal Minds, that airs Wednesdays on CBS–they always have famous people quotes–loved this one.

from Chuck Palahniuk,

“We all die. The object is not to live forever.  The object is to create something that will.”

also from Fitzgerald’s essay, “The Crack-Up”:

“One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”

from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s essay, “The Crack-Up”:

“I avoided writers very carefully because they can perpetuate trouble as no one else can.”

ain’t that the truth?

from Beryl Markham’s West With The Night (this one deserves its own post):

“There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing.  There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city.  There is silence after a rainstorm, and before a rainstorm, and these are not the same.  There is the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt.  There is a certain silence that can emanate from a lifeless object as from a chair lately used, or from a piano with old dust upon its keys, or from anything that has answered to the need of a man, for pleasure or for work.  This kind of silence can speak.  Its voice may be melancholy, but it is not always so; for the chair may have been left by a laughing child or the last notes of the piano may have been raucous and gay.  Whatever the mood or the circumstance, the essence of its quality may linger in the silence that follows.  It is a soundless echo.”

From Beryl Markham’s memoir, West With The Night:

“You can live a lifetime and, at the end of it, know more about other people than you know about yourself.   You learn to watch other people, but you never watch yourself because you strive against loneliness.  If you read a book, or shuffle a deck of cards, or care for a dog, you are avoiding yourself.  The abhorrence of loneliness is as natural as wanting to live at all”

“I knew too little of Africa to leave it, and what I knew I loved too much.  Peru was a name–a smudge of purple on a schoolbook map.  I could put my finger on Peru, but my feet were on the earth of Africa….There were men who said they had explored Africa; they had written books about it.  But I knew the truth.  I knew that, for myself, the country had not yet been found; it was unknown.  It had just barely been dreamed.”

from Kent Haruf,

“A girl is different. They want things.”

Also from the Dos Passos Prize reading,

“A writer is a reader moved out of emulation”

&

“After 35 years, I’m an overnight success”

&

“Writing on a computer…you may delete something you could later want. It’d be out there in the atmosphere somewhere”

“I often write the first draft of a scene with my eyes shut. [I've] put a stocking cap on my head to make sure”

And one, quoted by Haruf, from Frank O’Connor,

“What you have to do is get black on white”